Wednesday, 17 December 2014

WebMD’s Top Stories of 2014

Dec. 16, 2014 -- 2014 brought us the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, legal marijuana in two states, and the first view of people actually getting covered by the Affordable Care Act.

But in the age of social media, there are a lot of ways to define the “most popular” stories of the year -- most searched, most read, most shared, most retweeted.

These stories engaged our readers this year, heightening their awareness of diseases like Ebola and enterovirus D68 and informing them on topics ranging from the state of Alzheimer’s treatment and prevention to signs of suicide after comedian Robin Williams’ death.

Top Health Topic

The viral hemorrhagic fever has claimed more than 6,500 lives across the globe to date and sickened more than 18,000, mainly in West Africa.

Flights and airline routes were affected, national economies were destroyed, and popular pastimes in the hardest-hit countries were shut down.

The outbreak shows little sign of slowing in certain countries like Sierra Leone. The WHO says it expects the outbreak to claim thousands more lives before it ends. Governments and drug companies are scrambling to find any treatments that may work and to develop a vaccine.

It wasn’t until several people were flown back to the United States for treatment beginning in August that interest here began to pick up.

By October, when a Liberian man, Thomas Eric Duncan, became the first person diagnosed with Ebola on U.S. soil and infected two nurses who cared for him at a Dallas hospital, the interest skyrocketed.

Overall, searches for “Ebola” on WebMD showed the biggest traffic spike since the 2009 outbreak of swine flu. At its peak, interest in Ebola was up 1,200%. The top search term on the site was “Ebola”; the top question was “How is Ebola transmitted?”

Searches on WebMD for Ebola and other disease-related terms, including “Ebola virus” and “Ebola symptoms,” grew more than 2,800% for the year.